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2019 Vol.34, Issue 4 Preview Page
The Nominative Case Markers –i/ka and Marking Topic in Korean

한국어 주격 표지 ‘-이/가’와 화제의 표시

이종근

Lee, Jong Kun

28 February 2019. pp. 593-605
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Abstract
Previous studies on Korean Case markers (e.g. Schutze, 2001; Hong, 2017) observe that nominal phrases bearing the Case markers ‘-i/ka’ can appear as topics in Korean sentences. However, there has been no discussion about exactly when this is possible. The purpose of this study is to investigate the conditions under which the nominative Case markers ‘-i/ka’ in Korean can be attached to nominal phrases which are used as the topic of a sentence. The present work argues that the nominative Case markers ‘-i/ka’ can be attached to topic nominal phrases when the nominal phrase is a ratified topic in the sense of Lambrecht and Michaelis (1998). When the topic appears in a sentence as a ratified topic, it cannot allow the regular topic markers ‘-un/nun’ because the main function of the regular topic markers ‘-un/nun’ is topic/frame introduction. According to Kim (2015), ‘topic/frame introduction’ indicates “an act of proposing a new topic/frame into the discourse for the purpose of either beginning a discourse or shifting/contrasting an existing topic/frame.” The present work also argues that another reason why the topic markers ‘-un/nun’ cannot appear after some nominal phrases is that bare nouns bearing the topic markers ‘-un/nun’ in Korean (e.g. haksayng-un ‘student-TOP’) at the beginning of a sentence generally has a generic interpretation. When a bare noun necessitates a specific interpretation rather than a generic interpretation, the topic markers ‘-un/nun’ cannot occur.
Keywords
Case
focus
topic
topic marker
‘-i/ka’
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Information
  • Publisher :The Modern Linguistic Society of Korea
  • Publisher(Ko) :한국현대언어학회
  • Journal Title :The Journal of Studies in Language
  • Journal Title(Ko) :언어연구
  • Volume : 34
  • No :4
  • Pages :593-605
  • DOI :https://doi.org/10.18627/jslg.34.4.201902.593
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